From 17 to 19 April, the Cairo-based organization will host a three-day workshop training participants to document oral histories and personal archives. The aim is not merely preservation, but interpretation—using family records to trace shifting social norms, with particular attention to women’s roles.
The workshop extends a long-running WMF project that treats private archives as historical evidence. A seminar held last year laid the groundwork, examining diaries, letters, photographs, and personal papers belonging to women whose lives—famous or otherwise—mirror the evolution of Egyptian society across the 20th century.
That work is now moving into print. According to WMF co-founder Hoda Al-Sadda, an edited volume of more than 20 papers from the seminar is being prepared in collaboration with CEDEJ. The collection draws on a wide spectrum of material, from individual memoirs to collective archives.
Some of its most revealing insights come from unexpected sources.
Researcher Iman Hamdi, for instance, analyzes a diary kept by the activist Wedad Mitry—not for herself, but for her daughter, Reem Saad. The project began as an attempt to give the child a voice; it evolved into something more layered: a life narrative initiated by the mother and later continued by the daughter, now a leading figure in Egypt’s feminist movement.
The document’s significance lies as much in its form as in its context. It records a girl’s upbringing during the height of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule, when socialism—and a carefully circumscribed feminism—were actively promoted by the state. The result is both a personal record and a political artefact.
Mitry eventually entrusted her papers to WMF, partly during her lifetime and partly, after her death, through Saad.
Wedad Metri's wedding
Saad contributes to the forthcoming volume with a study of her mother’s travel notebooks from 1964 to 1967—a period that took Mitry across several Arab capitals on the eve of the June 1967 war. The notebooks capture a region on the brink, seen through the movements of a single observer.
Other contributions shift the focus to more recognizable figures, but with a critical edge. Dina Heshmat revisits Hoda Shaarawi, a central figure in Egypt’s feminist history, not to celebrate her legacy but to interrogate it—highlighting class divisions and political tensions within the elite circles she helped shape.
The volume also recovers less-discussed lives. Among them are Injy Efflatoun—artist, feminist, and communist—and Kawkab Hefni Nassef, one of the first Egyptian women physicians to pursue academic work abroad in the early 1920s.
Equally revealing are the stories of women operating at the margins of national identity. Malak Rouchdy writes on Mademoiselle Y. Frazaly, of Syro-Lebanese origin, who founded a Cairo bookshop that evolved into a cultural meeting point for figures such as Tewfik Al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, and Ahmed Bahaeddine. Another chapter examines Kristina Arvidsson, a Swedish physiotherapist who arrived in Egypt in 1965 to treat soldiers returning from the Yemen war and remained for decades.
A middle-class family from Heliopolis, 1958
In a more personal contribution, physician and writer Mohamed Aboul-Ghar reflects on Arvidsson’s life in Egypt through her private papers. These documents, he notes, reveal a sustained emotional engagement with the country’s defining moments—from the wars of 1967 and 1973 to the uprising of January 2011.
Beyond individual lives, the book turns to collective archives: those of communist organizations, labour activists, and women’s fine arts associations. It also examines mid-century media history, including the first generation of Egyptian television broadcasters following the launch of state television in July 1960.
For Al-Sadda, the project is part of a broader intellectual effort that dates back to the late 1990s. What began as a focus on oral histories of leading feminist figures has gradually expanded to encompass women’s contributions across multiple fields. A recent initiative, completed in 2024, documented women filmmakers through a series of interviews.
Wedad in childhood with sisters Afaf & Soad
The methods have evolved alongside the scope. WMF’s early recordings, once stored on cassette tapes, have been transferred to CDs and now to digital audio-visual formats. The organization is currently working to digitize its entire archive, including interviews and privately donated materials.
Nazly and family in a public park in Masr Guidida, 1952
At its core, the project rests on a simple premise: that private memory can illuminate public history. Yet Al-Sadda is careful to stress its limits. No single archive—or social group—can stand in for the whole.
Wedad with husband Dr Saad Luca and children
That, in part, explains the workshop itself. By training participants to work with family archives, WMF is attempting to widen the field—turning historical recovery into a shared practice rather than a closed academic exercise.
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